The Buddha was known as The Happy One. Though Joy is one of the Seven Factors of Awakening, with so much emphasis on working with suffering, joy can sometimes seem frivolous or unspiritual. His teaching on attending to the ‘Gladness Connected with the Wholesome’ is a key aspect of Wise Effort and developing a loving heart. We will practice and explore together this foundation for awakening joy.
With James Baraz recorded on January 15, 2023.
Found our teachings useful? Help us continue our work and support your teachers with a donation. Here’s how.
Discover more from the Dharma Library
-
What Can I Do to Help?! I’m At My Limit!
Recorded :
May 15, 2022 Sometimes as much as we want to help, we feel stuck. When we see children suffering and grandmothers crying in Ukraine, our hearts break, but the enormity of suffering feels like more than we can bear. How can we meet this wall, especially when our own personal resources are low? In this talk, I’ll teach…
-
Daily Meditation Recordings, with Nathan Glyde – Week of Sept 25, 2023
This week’s topic is “Getting A Feel For Feeling”. As we perceive, we add a feeling (vedanā) to our experience. When we are unaware of this process and react to the projected feeling, it causes unnecessary suffering (dukkha). However, understanding this process and responding skilfully leads to one of the deepest senses of freedom available. Let’s explore this freedom through our daily meditations this week.
-
The Wisdom of Equanimity
Recorded :
June 4, 2023 The dominant culture treats unpleasant feelings as problems, and pleasant feelings as if we should experience them all the time. This is neither possible nor wise. How can we fully feel the beautiful and painful aspects of our lives so that we are strengthened and enriched by the depth and breadth of this human experience?…
-
Daily Meditation Recordings, with Jaya Rudgard – Week of 21 April, 2025
We’re delighted to have Jaya Rudgard guiding our Daily Meditation sessions this week. May these sessions support and deepen your practice.
This week’s theme is: Still Here, Still Now: Waking Up to Life
As we develop our ability to remain present to experience our insight into the nature of that experience deepens. We’ll continue to explore this week how mindfulness can lead not just to less stress here and now but to the kind of seeing that will eventually free the heart-mind from all its self-created suffering.
Our Dharma Library thrives through collective generosity. Your donation helps sustain this offering for our entire community.
-
You Are NOT Doomed: Breaking & Replacing Old Patterns
Recorded :
March 26, 2023 You may have noticed that sometimes breaking old patterns is hard to do! But thanks to surviving ancient Buddhist teachings, we are NOT doomed to being stuck in the rut of the same old painful behavioral and cognitive patterns, and we can create new helpful patterns. This talk explores the nature of the conditioned mind…
-
Soften the hard places: opening our hearts to those we find difficult
Recorded :
May 5, 2019 The teacher Neem Karoli Baba said, “Don’t throw anyone out of your heart.” What about people who have hurt us, or are currently hurting us or others? In this session we explore together practices that help us to transform our resentment, fear and anger toward these difficult people, and learn to open our hearts to…
-
Freedom through focusing in.
Recorded :
September 25, 2016 Before this live session, Nina wrote: “I want to share a mindfulness technique this Sunday that’s particularly alive in my life right now. As a new mother I’ve experienced an increase in planning, anticipating, worrying, and fear. Before the birth of my daughter a few months ago I read a book by Karen Maezen Miller,…
-
Don’t be realistic. Be real
Recorded :
March 18, 2018 Through the cultures within family, education and work, we are constantly orientated towards ‘realistic’ expectations and visions for our lives. Dharma practice asks us to abandon the realistic in favour of the real; listening deeply to life and to how things actually are, so as to respond wisely and lovingly, fully and freely. In this…
Discussion